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Chinese Air Force

Most popular accounts make it
sound as if WW2 erupted suddenly in the fall of 1939. But,
one can easily argue that the war began several years
earlier, in 1931, in China.

China became a nominal republic in 1912, when Sun Yat-sen’s
Kuomintang (Nationalist Party) deposed the last Manchu
emperor. But the country’s most prosperous, mercantile
cities remained de facto foreign colonies. Shanghai’s
International Quarter was actually a European city within a
city, guarded by French and German legation guards and
British, Japanese, and American Marines. The hinterland was
ruled in feudal fashion by independent warlords, renegade
Imperial or republican generals, wealthy landowners, or
simple adventurers who exercised absolute powers of life and
death over their subjects. Much of their time was spent in
wars and conspiracies against rival warlords, so
European-equipped and led private armies were everywhere.
Sun Yat-sen, dependent entirely on the former Imperial army
for defence, found himself all but powerless. He was forced
into alliances with various warlords and lost control of the
government he had been elected to lead.

Sun Yat-sen had one powerful ally, however: Lenin. At a time
when all the Western powers were backing Japan and expanding
their colonies, Soviet Russia renounced Tsarist-era
territorial concessions and returned Chinese land. The
Soviets supplied arms and advisers to Sun Yat-sen’s movement
and set up a military academy under “Galen,” General Vasili
Bluecher, and political commissar Mikhail Borodin. Promising
Chinese army officers like Chiang Kai-shek were sent to
Moscow for advanced training. Soon, the Kuomintang was able
to secure a base of operations in Canton and, under the
leadership of Sun Yat-sen’s Moscow-sponsored successor,
Chiang, launched the Northern Expedition that would, by
1927, subjugate all warlords south of the Yangtze river.

In the 1920s, meanwhile, ultra-right, militarist factions
came to dominate the Imperial Japanese Army. They saw their
mission as conquest: Japan would establish a vast “East
Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” that would drive out the
Europeans and set Asians to their destined work, supplying
labor and raw materials for Greater Japan. Resource-rich
Manchuria and Mongolia were to be the initial targets of
this great expansion.

Thirty-five years of effort had produced substantial gains
by 1930. The Japanese had gained a foothold in China in the
one-sided Sino-Japanese War of 1895, when China ceded
Formosa (now Taiwan) and Koreato the Emperor's government.
The Russo-Japanese War built on this success by winning
control over the Russian naval base at Port Arthur and the
Russian railroads in southern Manchuria. The Versailles
Peace Conference rewarded Japan's wartime military and naval
service with additional territory in China. The German
colonies were awarded to Japan, in spite of the fact that
China had itself sided with the Allies. Japan greatly
expanded these holdings using anti-Bolshevism as cover.
Japan's forces in Russian East Asia were by far the largest
to join the Allied intervention.

In 1931, the generals decided that it was time to complete
this slow takeover of north China. When some track was
conveniently blown up along a Japanese-owned rail line near
the Japanese garrison at Mukden, Japan's Korea-based
Kwantung Army seized the whole province of Manchuria, citing
the need to “maintain order,” to protect Japanese nationals,
and, once again, to contain “communism.” The generals
unilaterally declared the independence of Manchuria from
China and proclaimed it the new Japanese protectorate of
Manchukuo. In a clear threat to the rest of China, they
selected the latter's deposed Manchu emperor as the puppet
head of state for their creation. The vain, gullible
princeling soon found himself a virtual prisoner in his own
supposed country.

Chinese resistance was seriously weakened at this time by a
rift in the ranks of the Kuomintang. Up until 1927, Chinese
Communists had held automatic dual membership in the
Nationalist Party. But their insistence on agrarian reform
alienated Chiang Kai-shek, himself the son of a wealthy
landlord. The Generalissimo had in any case been thoroughly
assimilated to the Chinese rightists, militarists, and
warlords that controlled much of his army. He was all but
completely dependent on the advice of the army's chief of
staff, the German mercenary Gen. von Falkenhausen (von
Falkenhausen successfully commanded China's forces until
1939, when Japanese pressure at last forced Hitler to insist
on his resignation). His army had the organization and
outlook of a German Freikorps, and its soldiers, with their
Mauser K98 rifles and automatic pistols, their coal-scuttle
helmets, nd their potato-masher grenades, looked and fought
like the thuggish Sturmtruppen of 1918-19.

In 1927, Chiang acted on the reactionary sentiments of his
circle and suddenly banned the Communist Party. The decree
automatically condemned everyone connected with the party to
death. The gruesome anti-communist reign of terror that
Chiang set in motion would eventually cost at least
1,000,000 defenceless men, women, and children their lives.
Grotesque, inhuman tortures, mass decapitations, and
systematic massacres of entire families and villages
embittered the civil population and deprived Chiang's army
and police of the popular support they would need in the
impending struggle with Japan. In spite of the obvious
dangers, Chiang remained ambivalent in the face of the
latter's growing incursions into Chinese territory. With the
liquidation of the Communists now the sole, overriding
objective of the Nationalist movement, the defence of the
national territory against foreign invasion seems to have
been at best a secondary concern. Forces and munitions were
husbanded for use against the regime's battered former ally,
even as the foreign aggressor seized the regime's territory
and killed its northern allies. At times, Chiang seems to
have looked on the fiercely anticommunist militarists of the
Kwantung Army more as potential supporters than as serious
threats.

Despite their horrendous cost to his movement and people,
Chiang's efforts were all for nought. In 1933, the
encircled, seemingly defeated Reds broke through Nationalist
army lines and began their epic Long March, a year-long,
6000-mile fighting retreat to the secure Communist base
areas of north- west China. The civil war that would end in
1948 with the Kuomintang’s ignominious retreat from the
mainland to Taiwan had now commenced.
Civil War, the Young Marshall, and the Bai Ying
The warlord's armed airliner and the general purpose biplane
typified Chinese aviation during this time of civil strife.
The Red Army had no air force. It’s strength lay in its
disciplined, peasant infantry and its paramilitary,
guerrilla organization. Chiang Kai-shek and Gen. von
Falkenhausen were thus chiefly interested in light
reconnaissance-bombers of the type that had proved so useful
against the Reds in Germany and the Baltic countries.
Between 1932 and 1936, the Nationalists bought 72 Douglas
O-2MC-2 and -10 attack bombers and twenty Vought V-92C
Corsairs, as well as twenty-four Heinkel He 66Ch biplane
dive bombers. These airplanes were good counter-insurgency
airplanes, well suited to close support of infantry,
railroad route security, and punitive raids on undefended
villages. But the qualities that made them excellent for
these purposes left the two-seaters unable to defend
themselves in the face of serious fighter opposition. The
warlord's bought similar airplanes, but also demonstrated a
taste for armed airliners and executive transports. Such
aircraft could perform most of the duties of their military
counterparts given the prevailing lack of opposition. But
they could also re-supply isolated units of the leader's
private army, boost his prestige, and transport him in style
and safety between different parts of his domain.

One such warlord's transport, a Boeing 247-D, called Bai-Ying
or “White Eagle,” performed what was perhaps the most
important aerial service of the Sino-Japanese conflict: it
brought about a suspension of the civil war and allowed the
Red and Nationalist armies to join forces against Japan. The
airplane belonged to one of the most successful Nationalist
generals, the fiercely anti-Communist, twenty-four year-old
warlord Chang Hsueh-liang, called the “Young Marshall.” In
1935, Chang bought the stock Boeing as his personal staff
transport. It flew him in and out of the combat areas and
dropped supplies to his troops during the anti-Red purges
and anti-warlord campaigns.

Chang and the Bai-Ying might never have distinguished
themselves from dozens of others, had Chang's Tungpei Army
not itself fallen victim to the Imperial Japanese Army's
insatiable appetite for expansion and Chiang Kai-shek's
obsessive campaign against communists and rivals, real or
imagined. Chang’s power base lay in Manchuria. When Japan
seized this territory, Chang's men were suddenly homeless.
They might at any moment turn on the Young Marshal whose
policies had failed them. At this critical juncture, Chiang
decided to let the Japanese dispose of the charismatic
Chang, a potential rival and critic of Chiang's quiescence
in the face of foreign aggression. The Generalissimo Chang
had faithfully served flatly refused to help him and tried
to turn the other generals and warlords against him. The
Young Marshal saw that he had to act immediately or lose the
confidence of his troops. Chang led the Tungpei Army into a
series of disastrous battles with the Japanese in Manchuria.
His men fought well by all accounts, but they lacked the
resources of their enemies. Late in 1935, the Tungpei Army
was driven out of Manchuria altogether. Seriously weakened
by its losses, it was then badly defeated in an encounter
with the Reds.

To Chang's surprise, the Communists did not massacre their
many prisoners in the usual Nationalist fashion (the heads
of Red POWs, hung from signposts and telegraph lines,
feature prominently in civil war-era photos). Instead, the
Manchurian troops were given a short but intense,
anti-Japanese indoctrination and sent back to their units.
Their accounts of the efficiency, organization, high morale,
and nationalism of the Red army and populace made a deep
impression on Chang. He immediately flew in his Boeing 247
to the Red capital in Yenan and signed an immediate secret
truce. Then, when Chiang Kai-shek came to Sian to harangue
the defeated troops, the Young Marshal called an immediate
meeting of the divisional commanders of both Nationalist
armies in the area. He convinced them that Chiang had to be
arrested and forced to fight the invaders. That done,
Chang’s bodyguard invested Chiang Kai-shek’s quarters and
arrested the Generalissimo. Within hours, army units across
China declared for the mutineers.

The Nationalist dictator expected to be killed. But instead,
Chang sent his Boeing to fetch a Communist delegation from
Yenan and various military leaders from other parts of
China. The Reds asked for nothing from Chiang Kai-shek but a
cessation of civil hostilities and an immediate war on Japan
under his leadership. They joined the Young Marshal in
pressing for the Generalissimo’s immediate release, though
many nervous army officers preferred that he be immediately
tried and executed. Chiang Kai-shek was released, and he
kept his promise. But he never forgave Chang Hsueh-liang.
When the honorable Young Marshal flew to Nanking in his
Boeing and surrendered to Chiang by way of apology for his
conduct at Sian, the Generalissimo had him imprisoned. The
KMT even took him with them when they fled to Taiwan, where
he remained in prison well into the 1990s.

Before his arrest, the young Marshal had ordered a second
Boeing, the subject of the illustration. Long-range fuel
tanks of the kind used in the MacRobertson trophy-race 247
replaced the uncomfortably cramped forward passenger cabin.
The growing threat of Japanese fighters led to the
installation of three .50-cal. machine guns, one replacing
the lavatory and two fixed in the nose baggage compartment.
Chang was already in prison when the plane was delivered,
and it never saw any useful service. A KMT pilot flew it
into a mountain shortly after delivery.
The Mercenaries: The 14th Squadron
In its early phases, the air war against Japan was fought
largely by the foreign mercenary pilots of the 14th
Squadron. This unit’s airmen included pilots from the United
States and France with a few Australians thrown in. Several
had recently served on the Republican side in Spain. Its
commander was an American WW1 veteran, Vincent Schmidt, and
its air gunners and ground staff were Chinese. The
squadron’s equipment was equally cosmopolitan: Vultee V-11
and Northrop 2E light bombers, a couple of Martin 139 medium
bombers, an armed Bellanca 28-90 racing plane, and a pair of
Dewoitine D-510 fighters.

In July 1937, the Japanese invaded China proper, seizing
Peking on the 28th. The 14th Squadron’s Northrops carried
out some of China’s first offensive action against Japan
when they bombed Japanese lines on 14 August, 1937. On the
night of May 19, 1938, Chinese crews flew two of the unit’s
surviving Martin bombers on a leaflet raid over Nagasaki.
Western pilots also served on Hawk IIIs at Hanchow (4th
Wing) and on D-510s at Kunming.
The Kuomintang and the Soviets
Soviet airmen and equipment poured into China after the
Japanese attacks began. I-15bis fighter biplanes and I-16
monoplanes were probably the most numerous warplanes in
China prior to Pearl Harbour and open American intervention.
China’s long range bomber force was composed almost entirely
of Russian-flown Tupolev SB-2s, a number of which raided
Japanese-occupied Formosa (now Taiwan). Unfortunately,
little seems to be now be known about this largely
clandestine operation.

Camouflage and Markings
Chinese Nationalist airplanes were often delivered in silver
dope or natural metal. But most received a camouflage finish
consisting of dark, olive green on all surfaces. Sometimes
only the upper surfaces were painted, the undersides of the
flying surfaces and, often, the fuselage being left in
unpainted metal or aluminium dope. The camouflage paint
seems to have worn rapidly, so many aircraft have a mottled
appearance. Soviet aircraft normally carried standard VVS
camouflage: olive green upper surfaces and pale blue-grey
under surfaces. But the top sides of SB-2s and I-153s were
sometimes given a green mottle over bare metal or, possibly,
light blue-grey. Some Vultees may have also carried this
type of camouflage. The Boeing 281 Pea-shooters based at
Nanking were at first painted pale grey overall. Later, this
gave way to the standard dark green on all surfaces, though
fighters serving in the same units can be seen in both
finishes. Curtiss Hawks were always green on all surfaces.

Chinese markings varied considerably in this period. The
standard markings were horizontal blue-and-white rudder
stripes and a white Nationalist star carried on the wings.
China never had air superiority. So, since friendly-fire was
unlikely from above, only the under surfaces were marked.
But these were not hard-and-fast rules. V-92 Corsairs were
delivered with vertical rudder stripes, though this may have
been the result of confusion at Vought. On bare metal and
some green-camouflaged aircraft, the star was superimposed
on a blue disk. When the under surfaces were dark green,
however, the disk was normally omitted. Blue or black
tactical numbers were carried on the rear fuselage sides.
They could be almost any shape, style or size, with lots of
variation, even within units. National insignia were not
normally painted on the fuselage. However, some of the
repainted Nanking Boeing 281s had the star and disk on the
fuselage sides and some Hawk IIIs had ragged, hand-painted
stars on the sides of the nose. Presentation messages in
white Chinese characters were sometimes painted in the same
position on Hawks. Since Japan's navy made extensive use of
license-built Heinkel 66s (Aichi D1A1/2 navy bombers),
Chinese He66Ch aircraft carried large, yellow identification
panels on their wings and fuselages.

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